In an ideal world, we'd all be developing for the latest Flash 7 player subversion and every one of our users would have already updated their systems with the latest plugin. As things stand, real-world projects still publish for the Flash 6 Player (even Flash 5 sometimes) and have to support users who may have one of the dozens of minor player versions that exist.

It is a common fallacy to assume that there is such a thing as the "Flash 6 Player" or "Flash 7 Player". In actuality, that's just a blanket term to refer to a family of player subversions that exist for each major version. The "minor version" (or "subversion") nomenclature is nothing more than a marketing gimmick -- an effort to make the Flash Player Penetration Statistics appear higher than they would be if they were calculated separately for each "subversion" of the player.

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Thanks, Aral. It's my pleasure to help the RIA developer community.

Yes, I came across two issues. One was with the migration from MM Flash Remoting to OpenAMF. With MM Flash Remoting, some arrays of numbers were passed as Doubles, where with OpenAMF they were Integers. The second issue had to do with the version of OpenAMF.

With the Java type of numbers passed via OpenAMF, diagnosis of this issue was a little tricky. The error manifested itself as what appeared to be a Tomcat connection issue, but it became very obvious when I saw a logged ClassCastException error. The fix was trivial in this application as we only deal with what are effectively Integers, but there are some implications. I hope that OpenAMF isn't trying to intelligently type the numbers that come down the wire (unlikely, but what happens when Flash passes a double or a float?).

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I'm very happy to introduce our newest author on FlashAnt, Lindsay Smith. Lindsay is the lead java programmer at Telrock Communications and we have been working together with him for a little while now on Release 2 of Opal.

Our collaboration began back in November of last year when we got together to play the planning game for the second release. Based on the stories that resulted, we planned two iterations for the second release: In the first iteration, Opal would be migrated to Flash MX 2004 and optimized to achieve a further performance boost and in the second, we would be adding some nice new features. The first iteration was successfully completed before the New Year and we started work on the second iteration this week.

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